ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2016
The Achilles' heel hypothesis: misinformed keystone individuals impair collective learning and reduce group success.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It has been retracted, and should not be counted. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial proximity and prey vibratory cues influence collective hunting in social spiders.Israel journal of ecology & evolution · 2020Article
- Diurnal variation in the production of vocal information about food supports a model of social adjustment in wild songbirds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- High-magnitude innovators as keystone individuals in the evolution of culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Selection for Collective Aggressiveness Favors Social Susceptibility in Social Spiders.Current biology : CB · 2018Article
- Intraindividual Behavioral Variability Predicts Foraging Outcome in a Beach-dwelling Jumping Spider.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Exposure to predators reduces collective foraging aggressiveness and eliminates its relationship with colony personality composition.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2017Article
- The Effect of Keystone Individuals on Collective Outcomes Can Be Mediated through Interactions or Behavioral Persistence.The American naturalist · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
- Retraction · 2020-07-29Concerns/Issues about Results and/or Conclusions · Investigation by Company/Institution · Unreliable Data · Upgrade/Update of Prior Notice(s) ·
- Expression of concern · 2020-04-29Concerns/Issues about Results and/or Conclusions · Investigation by Company/Institution · Updated to Retraction ·
- Expression of concern
- Retracted
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Many animal societies rely on highly influential keystone individuals for proper functioning. When information quality is important for group success, such keystone individuals have the potential to diminish group performance if they possess inaccurate information. Here, we test whether information quality (accurate or inaccurate) influences collective outcomes when keystone individuals are the first to acquire it. We trained keystone or generic individuals to attack or avoid novel stimuli and implanted these trained individuals within groups of naive colony-mates. We subsequently tracked how quickly groups learned about their environment in situations that matched (accurate information) or mismatched (inaccurate information) the training of the trained individual. We found that colonies with just one accurately informed individual were quicker to learn to attack a novel prey stimulus than colonies with no informed individuals. However, this effect was no more pronounced when the informed individual was a keystone individual. In contrast, keystones with inaccurate information had larger effects than generic individuals with identical information: groups containing keystones with inaccurate information took longer to learn to attack/avoid prey/predator stimuli and gained less weight than groups harbouring generic individuals with identical information. Our results convey that misinformed keystone individuals can become points of vulnerability for their societies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.